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<h1>What a TouchStone experiment is</h1>

<p>TouchStone is a tool to help experimenters in conducting controlled experiments. A <a href="glossary.html#controlled-experiment">controlled experiment</a> is a method to capture the causal relationships between <a href="glossary.html#factor">factors</a> and <a href="glossary.html#measure">measures</a>. To that end an experimenter must define a <a href="glossary.html#task">task</a> as a function of the different factors <a href="glossary.html#value">values</a> and a <a href="glossary.html#design">protocol</a> to present the different trials (i.e. a trial is the task with a given combination of factor values). Trials are usually organized into blocks (e.g., to avoid perturbing participants with too many successive changes).</p>

<p>Basically, TouchStone assists the experimenter in specifying all the required <a href="glossary.html#experiment-component">experiment components</a>. A component is a factor, a measure, a block of trials or an inter-title (an inter-trial or an inter-block). Based on this specification, TouchStone outputs a summary as an XML file. This file can be run as a script with the TouchStone run platform.</p>

<h1>More explanations</h1>

<p>[TODO] schema state machine + references script Java classes</p>

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